Jay Mathews discusses the dishonorable (but long-standing) practice of fudging the numbers:
Many states are finding creative ways to misinterpret the rules for reporting their statistics so that their school children seem to be doing wonderfully even though that often is not the case.This is the latest version of a game that has been popular since Alexander Hamilton and James Madison created the federal system as a playground for generations of political mischief makers like themselves...
Now there is a new report on how states are hiding their feeble high school graduation rates under thick glops of statistical nonsense. It is "Getting Honest About Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose," by Daria Hall of the Education Trust, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works for higher academic achievement, particularly for low-income and minority children. The report is available on the Education Trust website.
No Child Left Behind tries to encourage high schools to improve their graduation rates, but unlike its test score improvement provisions, it does not threaten much action if they don't. It turns out this is like telling all the thieves in the neighborhood that you have turned off your burglar alarm. No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001 because many states ignored similar rules in the 1990s that had no muscle behind them. That is happening again with graduation rates, Hall said.
The report is here. It makes for eye-opening reading, especially when you realize that some states don't count pre-senior-year dropouts when calculating graduation rates, and other states don't report graduation rates at all.
Posted by kswygert at June 28, 2005 05:14 PM